by James Axler
Although the baron’s world and this spectral world of the pool’s victims overlapped visually—he could see them, but they could not see him—they didn’t overlap tangibly. There was no sensation of contact as the gauzy forms passed through or brushed against him. Kerr had become so used to the horrors of these hallucinations that they had become nothing more than an annoyance. Especially when the sun was going down. The angled, softened light made it difficult to see through the randomly shifting apparitions.
Though the pool could be subtle in its manipulations, it wasn’t in this case. His visions of the legions of dead were meant to demonstrate how close the ones who had gone before were, how close freedom was, and yet always just beyond his reach. It was a constant, minute-by-minute reminder that he who wanted more than anything to escape could not.
Once Kerr had had a life, though he could barely remember it. Once he had had faith, though that was dead to him. The pool had taken everything. It had taken his soul.
When the procession reached its denuded bank, the pool was quiet. It reflected the peach and turquoise of the sunset, and the black fringe of the trees along the ridgeline above.
The flock looked to Baron Kerr for further instructions.
“The body is never alone,” he told them. “It has gathered and keeps a web of creatures around it. A family connected by the chain of life. Each member of the family performs a different task, or set of tasks, all to insure the body’s health and well-being. And the body, in return, insures the health and wellbeing of all its family members.”
He pointed at the tools in the cart and the corpses under them. “As loyal members of that family, we have one more job to perform. The dead must be cut up in small pieces, so the fish in the pool can eat them.”
Several of the newcomers grabbed the implements and immediately set to hacking up the corpses into chunks. Red Coat showed a particular zeal for the task, and he kept looking up from the gruesome work, wiping the spattered blood from his face with his coat cuff, and shooting Kerr a look of absolute hatred.
“Do you really think that one’s your ticket on the last train west?” said a croaking voice from the waterline behind him.
Kerr glanced down and saw a six-foot-long lung-fish bobbing in the shallows. Its back and tail were three-quarters out of the water as it rested on its pectoral spikes, and breathed air. “Could be,” the baron answered. “If nothing is possible, then anything is possible.”
The lungfish chuckled, lowering its head and making a bubbling noise underwater that Kerr found most irritating. “You’ve got to be kidding,” the fish said. “How many times have you thought you had a way out of this place? A hundred? A thousand? Face facts, the pool is never going to let you go, Baron. You’re its A-Number-One Boy, forever.”
“What do you know?” Kerr snapped back. “A talking fish? You might not even exist. You might be just another hallucination.”
“Well, this hallucination is getting mighty hungry. How about tossing me some chow?”
Kerr walked over to the cart, picked up some of the pieces that had fallen on the ground and flung them as far out into the lake as he could.
“You could have just handed me one,” the lungfish complained. Then, with a swish of its wide tail, it turned away from the shore and swam to join the feeding frenzy that had already begun.
The baron watched Red Coat continue to work on the remaining bodies, and to shoot him more of the evil looks. Despite the lungfish’s prediction of another failure, Kerr became more and more hopeful that the man with the red hair had the right stuff for a much more difficult job than quartering a torso, that he had both the homicidal tendencies and the unique brand of delusion necessary to end his own intolerable suffering.
Standing there, Kerr had a sudden, chilling realization. After killing him, Red Coat would most certainly throw him into the pool.
The baron had never considered the likely consequences of his being chopped up and fed to the fish. All he’d wanted was to be dead and gone. But now that he saw that dying might really be possible, it became clear to him that dying might not mean escape.
The lungfish were the intermediate processors, the predigesters of the pool’s food. Their guts broke the tissue and bone into a simpler form. What they excreted, and what drifted down, was what sustained the fungal entity that carpeted the bottom and sent fingers of itself worming down through the mountainside. If his life force was consumed by the pool, assimilated by it, Kerr realized he could still be part of it. Conscripted into the army of ghosts that swirled around him. If that was the case, the fish was right—he would never get away.
When the chopping and feeding were completed, the baron waved the crowd back down the trail to the ville. As they began to move, he cut overland, climbing over the fallen blocks of stone. Kerr had a goal in mind, if not an exact plan. He made for the edge of one of the deepest of the hillside’s potholes, a circular opening more than thirty feet across. When he reached his destination, he stopped, picked up a rock from the ground at his feet and dropped it into the hole. It took seven seconds for the stone to splash.
The blackness below him promised what he sought: true and eternal oblivion. If he stepped off the edge, there was no way his body could be recovered by Red Coat and turned into fish food. And even though the filaments of the pool probably decorated the walls of the yawning cavern, they couldn’t dine on his corpse. The tendrils had no feeding apparatus; they were the fungis’ fruiting bodies, whose only function was to produce bounty. And even if they did have a way of digesting things that he was unaware of, without the intercession of the lungfish, his body was in the wrong form for them to use.
Kerr stood on the edge, poised to end his life, but he didn’t take the fatal step.
He couldn’t take it. His legs wouldn’t move forward.
If stepping off into one of the potholes and chilling himself had actually been possible, Baron Kerr would have done it long, long ago. It was impossible because the pool would not allow him to injure himself. It kept him safe because it needed him.
Kerr heard the sounds of rocks shifting and the scraping of boot soles. Someone was coming up behind him.
“You’ve got a pretty sweet operation going for yourself here,” said a voice to his back.
The baron turned and faced Red Coat, who was smiling in an unfriendly way.
“Mebbe it’s too much for you to handle,” the red-haired man suggested as he moved closer. He reached up and scratched at his scraggly red goatee. “Mebbe you need a partner.”
“I don’t need a partner,” Kerr said, letting Red Coat get within arm’s reach. The pool forced him to shift to the right; Red Coat countered. And when he did that, the baron had no place left to retreat to. His heels were a foot from the edge of the pothole.
“How about a hostile takeover, then?” the red-haired man suggested, leaning closer still.
It was then, and only then, that Kerr smiled back. The broadest, most infuriating smile he could muster.
Red Coat’s arms came up, and the heels of his hands slammed into the baron’s chest. As he went off balance, the pool made him flap his arms to try to regain it.
But the push was too hard.
James Kerr went over backward, somersaulting into the blackness.
His victory cry lasted exactly seven seconds.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Crecca stood on the rim of the pothole and listened as the echoes of Baron Kerr’s final cry and splashdown faded away. Then he did a celebration dance, loosely adapted from the choreography in the Tiffany video, complete with head jukes. Nothing stood between him and the baronship.
Nothing.
“I am Baron Magnificent Crecca,” he shouted into the cavern below, the words booming.
He liked the sound of it so much that he shouted it again.
It was an announcement to the world, a taunt to his newly dead predecessor and a self-coronation.
The triumphant Baron Magnificent Crecca no longer h
ad a human—or partly human—overlord he had to answer to. No more Magus. No one to be afraid of. No one he had to hand over the lion’s share of the spoils to. The pool had shown him his heart’s true desire, his true mission; his entire life he had been waiting for, and working toward this very end. All he had ever wanted was to rule over his own private kingdom. Not some fly-by-night gypsy tent carny, but a real kingdom, with real territory and real influence that he could build on and expand. He had never had the means to get what he wanted before. He had always had to compromise his desire, to give up dominion in order to seize a small part of his dream. Now he had all the power he needed to make it happen.
All the power and then some.
He peered into the darkness of the pothole and couldn’t see the bottom, or Kerr’s body. It angered him that the former baron’s corpse was lost to harvest because the pool was still very hungry. Even with his eyes averted, Crecca could sense its lingering agitation. He felt it as a prickling sensation on the back of his neck and a faint fluttering in the pit of his stomach. Without looking he knew that from the surface of the water, a mist was starting to rise, and mixed in were twinkling bits of silver confetti.
Another spore fall wouldn’t be long in coming.
Crecca knew instinctively, and with absolute certainty, that the pool’s unappeased appetite had to do with its having been semistarved for weeks. He also knew that the previous baron had allowed the ville’s human population to slowly dwindle. Of late, Kerr hadn’t done a good job of recruiting new residents, and he had phased out the sacrificing of the people that were here. It was almost as if he had wanted the pool to suffer.
That was all going to change now.
Under Crecca’s stewardship, the burning pool would never be hungry again. If it needed more bodies to satisfy the hunger it had built up under the Kerr regime, it would have them. At once.
When the new baron looked back to the trail, he saw the crowd had gone on without him and was already almost at the bottom of the hillside. The evening light that surrounded him was turning purple and beginning to fade to night. He traversed the blocks and circled the yawning pitfalls of the slope, regaining the crude road and descending it at a trot. He caught up with the others shortly after they reached the square.
Azimuth was standing behind the burn barrel, busy cooking the fresh bounty. Flames leaped from the barrel as he rolled the gray globs into position on the grate with a block of wood. The crowd stood in a long, orderly line, waiting for the meal to be handed out.
They would have to wait a little bit longer.
The pool demanded to be fed first.
The former carny master picked up the iron pipe and stepped onto the seat of the Clobbering Chair. He banged the pipe on the chair’s arms to get their attention. All heads slowly turned his way.
“Baron Kerr is dead,” he told them. “I have been chosen to be the new baron of this place.”
There was no reaction from the crowd. No groans of shock or sadness upon hearing of the old baron’s demise. No cheers or applause at the announcement of a new leader to take his place. Their smiles were the same, before and after the announcement.
As Crecca reviewed his grinning subjects, he wondered if the information he’d just imparted had even penetrated their spore-and-bounty-befuddled brains. And if it had penetrated, how had their brains translated and interpreted his words? How had the meaning been distorted by their individual delusions? In the end, it didn’t matter. The line of people accepted him as their new ruler as they accepted everything else: without blinking an eye.
“The body isn’t satisfied,” he said. “The body needs more.” He tapped on the arm of the chair. “Who would like to volunteer?”
Everyone, it seemed.
The food line broke up, and its members encircled the Clobbering Chair and the baron. From the mountain above came a roll of thunder and faint flashes of green light. Azimuth left a clutch of bounty to burn to cinders on the grill, threw down his block of wood and joined them.
“You!” Crecca said, pointing at the black man with the end of the yard-long pipe. “Come over here and take the load off.”
The choice of sacrifice had nothing to do with any lingering bad feelings Crecca had over their struggle earlier in the afternoon. In fact, he had no lingering feelings, one way or another, about the incident. The choice was made on the basis of seniority. The choice had been made by the pool itself. Azimuth had been in the ville longer than any other surviving person. He had inhaled and ingested more spores, eaten more bounty; he was the best prepared—having undergone a kind of a mental and physical tenderizing—to meet the very specific needs of the body.
The carny scout thrust both arms above his head, danced in a circle and cried, “Yes!”
As if he had just won the big prize.
Bingo!
Crecca hopped from the chair, making room for Azimuth to take his seat. As the big man sat down, he rounded the back of the chair and got into position for the clobbering.
Some of the rousties rushed in to buckle down the wrist and ankle straps. As they did, Azimuth slapped out a reggae rhythm on the chair’s arms, bobbing his head and shaking his dreads.
“I never thought I’d ever get to sit in with you, my brother,” he said over his broad shoulder, addressing the new baron. “It’s my biggest dream come true. I am so bloody stoked, mon.”
Crecca gripped the length of pipe like a baseball bat. It was much heavier than a bat, though. And when he took a practice cut with it, the thing whistled through the air and slammed into the dirt.
“Play that tune,” Azimuth entreated him with a grin so wide that it showed every one of his hand-sharpened yellow teeth. “Wail on me, Marley!”
Crecca swung from the soles of his boots, putting the full weight of his body behind the blow. The impact jolted up his arms and deep into his shoulder joints. The pipe sounded a dull clunk as it bounced high off its target.
Baron Magnificent Crecca stepped nimbly aside as blood from the massive scalp wound he had inflicted jetted in a fine spray three feet in the air. Azimuth’s body convulsed violently. It jerked so hard and so erratically that it set the chair rocking, then tipped it over sideways. Both the chair and the body hit the ground in a cloud of dust. For a long moment, the unconscious black man spasmed in the dirt.
Then Azimuth’s eyes popped open, and he began to scream. As he fought against the straps, his shrill cries were blood-curdling.
Crecca moved forward and hit him again.
And again.
It took a half-dozen full-power blows of the pipe to dispatch the huge man. And by the time it was over, his head from the ears up was an undistinguishable mass of shattered bone, brains and dreads.
Puffing from the effort he’d expended, the former carny master lowered his head and leaned on the handle of the pipe for a couple of minutes. He was the only one in the audience who was resting. His rousties unfastened the straps holding down the scout’s body, then lifted the corpse and dumped it headfirst into the cart. When he’d recovered his breath, Crecca bent, grabbed the fallen chair by an arm and set it upright. Azimuth was a big man, but he wasn’t quite big enough to fill the pool’s requirements. As the baron looked over his beaming subjects, he said, “Who’s next?”
The crowd edged closer. Everyone wanted to be next.
Crecca’s glance swept past, then returned to the young son of Ryan Cawdor. He was just the right size. He aimed the bloody pipe at the boy. “How about you, then?” he said.
Crecca didn’t have to ask twice.
Dean raced over to take a seat in the gore-splattered chair. He looked very, very happy as the rousties cinched him down.
Crecca put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and said, “I promise to try to do a neater job of it this time.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Doc hung back at poolside while the others started back down the hill with the empty cart. When they were out of sight over the lip of the slope, he slogged over to
where Ryan had dropped his longblaster. He pulled the Steyr from the mud and used the tail of his frock coat to wipe some of the dirt from the barrel, scope and stock. The weapon had gone in muzzle first, so he had to assume the bore was blocked. There was no time to clear it. And he had nothing to clear it with. He slung the bolt-action rifle over his shoulder and hurried down the trail. By the time he caught up the rest of the group, they were lining up in front of the burn barrel to get another ration of the wormy chow. His own stomach growling, Doc carefully hid the Steyr against the wall at the far end of the blockhouse.
As the old man walked across the square to join the others, the carny master climbed on the bloody chair and banged on its arm with the metal cudgel to get everyone’s attention.
Doc had hoped that the chilling was over for the day. He had counted on having the entire night to work out a plan for getting his companions away from the gruesome horror of this hellhole.
But it wasn’t to be.
The red-haired carny master announced a coup d’état and proclaimed himself baron. Looking at the man, Doc had no doubt that he had dispatched the former ruler personally. Because both men were in the control of the pool, because both were coldheart chillers of the lowest order, it didn’t matter who was baron. The agenda was the same.
Doc’s heart leaped into his throat when the new headman said the pool wasn’t satisfied and called for volunteers. Of which there were plenty, including his own dear friends.
Doc’s window of opportunity was rapidly slamming shut.
The simplest course of action was to break the spell of the pool, but he had tried that without success. There was nothing he could do to the companions themselves to snap them out of it. He had noticed that their respective dazes seemed to wane at times, that they appeared to be struggling against the reins. He also noticed that their resistance to control ended with the paralysis that followed each spore fall. If this wasn’t an illusion on his part, it meant that the confused state of mind was temporary, and maintained only by regular redosing with spores, and perhaps with bounty. From the thunder and lightning coming over the ridge above, another downpour was imminent, as was another meal of fungal nodes.
